An Introduction to SEO: The ultimate beginners guide

Alright, so you have a blog or website setup and you are ready to fill it with content. But how will people find your content? How do you get your content in the search results? and how can you get traffic (visitors.) The answer to all of those questions is SEO. SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation". I know that this sounds technical or difficult, but it is actually pretty simple. The actual SEO process is time-consuming (unless your hire someone) but the concept of SEO is simple. In this article, I will give you an introduction to the world of SEO!

Black hat and white hat SEO

Black hat SEO and White hat SEO are opposites. Both of them are SEO methods, but they are both completely different and each have their own benefits. White hat SEO is ethical SEO and Black Hat SEO is unethical. White hat SEO is definitely the path you want to follow and here is why:

Pro's of white hat SEO 

white hat seo. Google and other search engines love white hat SEO
. You will have long-term success
. You are more likely to stay on googles first page
.You will earn tonnes of traffic
. Your domain (URL) will gain trust and a better page rank
. Your content will be on the first page of google
. You will earn tonnes of sales

Con's of white hat SEO

.Time consuming and requires a lot of effort.
. If you have been doing it wrong you may have to delete some content
. Can be expensive (if you buy SEO services)
. You have to do a lot of research into different SEO factors.

black hat seoPro's of black hat SEO

.fast/short term success
.quick cash
.easy
.less time consuming that white hat

Con's of Black hat SEO

. You will be banned from google search results if you are caught
.  Damages your page rank
. Google won't trust you
. Your site will only prosper for a couple of days
. It is unethical, meaning it breaks googles' guide lines.

Black hat and White hat Seo Summary 

Never Ever use black hat SEO! You will get your website black listed and after that its game over! It may be tempting, it may promise a lot, but in the long run, you are destroying your site! White hat is slow but very very useful and rewarding. Having an ethical site ranking on the first page of google is a dream come true.

On page SEO 

Now that I have discussed ethical and unethical SEO techniques, it is time to discuss On page and Off page SEO. On page SEO is the process of optimising your website for google. For example Meta tags, title tags, keyword density etc. This may sound complicated, but it is not. Making a few changes to your website could get you in googles good books and it is not that hard. Now I will go over a few simple on-page SEO factors you could master in minutes.

website link structure Keyword density 

As you may know, SEO is all about ranking for certain keywords. For example, if you rank on the first page of google for "funny cat pictures", whenever a person googles "funny cat pictures", your site/page will show up. Now keyword density is the amount of times you use your target keywords in an article. If you use keywords to the point that your article makes no sense, Google will know and your website/page will be penalised. So you need to know how often to use your keywords. People say that you should use your keyword "here and there" for best results and I agree.

Title optimization 

Title optimisation is very important. Google and other search engines will look at your title to see what your website is about, so you need to put your keyword in your title. This will make sure google knows you want to rank for this keyword.

Number of keyword to target

Now this one is important. You don't want to go overboard with how many keywords you target. This is because the more keywords you try to rank for, the less chance you have to rank for all of them. Instead, pick 1 main keyword and a few secondary keywords. For example having "barbeque sauce" as your main key word and your secondary keywords as "best barbeque sauce", "best barbeque sauce in the world".

Off page SEO

social signals structure In my opinion, Off page SEO is more important than on page SEO. Don't get me wrong, having a good website or blog is important, but in terms of ranking in the search engines off page SEO rocks! There is not much to say about Off page SEO, as the main aspect of Off page SEO is getting Backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites pointing to your site. However, there are certain things search engines consider when deciding how valuable a backlink is.

How valuable is my backlink?

There are a few things google uses to decide how valuable a backlink is. The first on (and the most important one) is the websites page rank. If you get a backlink from a trusted website, that backlink is significantly more valuable than a backlink from a low page rank website. So getting 2 high-quality backlinks is better than a thousand low-quality backlinks. The second factor is the number of links on the page. If a page has a 100 links on it, then a link on that page is less valuable than a page with 1 link on it. The third factor is if the link is do-follow or no-follow. A do-follow link allows search engines to follow the link and crawl the website on the other side, however, a no-follow link does not allow search engines to follow the link.


Summary 

I know that this is a lot to take in, but once you get to grips with SEO it is very easy. I hope you found this article useful and I will leave links to some of my other articles about SEO strategies. The Strategies will be easy to follow.

The Skyscraper SEO Strategy








2 comments:

  1. I hope you found this article useful (: Please leave a comment if you need some help.

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